Chapter Three

Sore head today, so leaving the detailed citations of chapter two to another day (tomorrow, hopefully) and dealing with copying and pasting large amounts of text into the third chapter. Also dealt with a few equations and will attempt a table in a moment.

Also been preparing an addition to the plotting tool for the proton H beta profile model, which is the instrument profile convolution, which should widen it out a little. In effect, all the monochromatic intensities at each wavelength are shared out through Guassians of the FWHM I've got. It just means I can plot at least three graphs each time rather than one or two...

Ok, that's quite a bit done

Figures
3.1 - O2 photoabsorption cross-section from Rees

More

List of figures in the intro:
1.1 - hydrostatic equilibrium
1.2 - neutral densities in MSIS
1.3 - atmospheric transmission of radiation
1.4 - temperature structure of the atmosphere
1.5 - ion structure
1.6 - bounce motion
1.7 - solar wind and bowshocks
1.8 - extended magnetosphere
1.9? - collisions/gryoradius etc considerations?
1.10? - Excitation energy levels?
1.X - temp structures of planets? Atmospheric densities?

The text and equations for the introduction are in latex format at least. A bit of chapter two and both of its tables are now in suitably too.

Have had a meeting with Ian F about the thesis outline and timeline. Also obtained data from him. More may come along soon enough.

STEREO and latex

Quick meeting with Ian F about previous meeting with Ian F and future (tomorrow) meeting with Ian F.

Seminar on STEREO, with 3D glasses and everything. Oh to be a scientist...

More latex, including sticking in a very large equation from Risbeth involving lots of dynamical terms. Eep. Much of the introduction now covered with three out of seven sections slapped in. Have listed three or four figures that need creating/finding and including. This will be done once the text and equations are done.

Discussion with Makenzie about the state of her data. More profiles by the end of the week, though that deadline was slipping further away even as the conversation progressed...

work, work, work

Right, have continued and completed interpolation of the Grodent atmosphere. Now need to wrap a program round it, but first my mind, such as it is, turns towards the windows-born mess of a program that is MICdev - the display system for the spectrograph, created by a postdoc and improved in various ways since. I have now been taught in the dark arts of setting it up and off and my job is to get it working on a unix system.

Initial attempts yesterday were not promising. Asking it to compile is the easiest way to hear a computer laugh (after asking the latex template of the thesis to compile...). I was going to grab the apl laptop, but my one single bit of idl knowledge (that it uses unix and so hate uppercase letters) was brought into play first. I renamed every single file and now it works. To an extent. There are still problems.

Windows retain is not employed. Most annoying.
The output is logged to the terminal, but needs to be stuck into a file for easy reading.
Image output is to a strange file format. IanF assumes this means no images can be output, I will investigate the widget to see whether or not this is so. If it is, my own widget will replace the current one. If not, then I will tweak the output format into something a little more useful.
Flatfielding/dark current subtraction creates some interesting stuff to happen (due to over corrections with the flats). 'Correcting' a five second exposure with four hour long exposures certainly provides a flat field, but not quite the one expected...

Lets see if I can tackle this one in the future, but now I've got it working (and have tested with some data) I can at least use it as a display mechanism, to an extent.

ok, sorted out the last of the compilation errors...

retaiun=2 now stuck in 'spectro.pro', where previously the decompose=0 version was used. Now works fine, all images are retained. The program is usable! Usable enough to find the problem with darks and flats - just need to reautoscale the thing.

Right, now that works and has been tested enough (for now, twitching to do more, but have other jobs) back to Grodentish atmosphere.

Here we go again. Makefile:
randgen - no changes
atom - change to five species
cross - change to five species
electron - as above
strike - ditto
proton - ditto
proton1 - ditto
hit - ditto
back - ditto
selectron - ditto
recoil - ditto

So, ones that are ready:
randgen - done!
atom - done!
cross - recombination sorted, dissociation sorted

Still to do:
cross - scattering, ionisation and excitation related stuff
electron
strike
proton
proton1
hit
back
selectron
recoil

Work, work, work

In early for meeting with Alan about thesis outline and timings

Then meeting with Ian F, learning about the GUI for reading spectrograph data

Extrapolated more Grodent atmosphere